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Hacked Syrian Officials Used '12345' As Email Password
Nominei writes "The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports that the Syrian President, aides and staffers had their email hacked by Anonymous, who leaked hundreds of emails online. Reportedly, many of the accounts used the password '12345' (which their IT department probably warned them to change when the accounts got set up, of course)."
I've got the same combination on my luggage!
I thought that everyone knew to use at least 123456 as their password. After all that increases its security by an order of magnitude!
"To prevent this day from getting any worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD THING" 1GJU8xLuDKDxEs4KLf8fAGyptoDsqvEsBT
then the IT guy got taken into the alley and shot in the head for his impudence.
Every time I go to pastebin.com and look at the hacked sites the passwords are always weak, extremely weak, virtually no one uses strong passwords.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Is this really 'hacking' when you guess the password?
Reminds me of the script-kiddie who 'hacked' into Sarah Palin's email account once he successfully guessed her password was 'popcorn'...
Wonder how he's doing in prison?
Ken
If a bunch of kids could hack into Syran government email by typing "12345", you'd imagine that at least one of the big cyberwarfare or intelligence units out there- the U.S., Israel, or China- would have thought of the same trick and has already been monitoring their communications for a while. At least you'd hope so. I'd hate to think that right now there are of a couple of NSA agents looking at each other and saying, "12345... hey, why didn't we think of that?"
It was just the dept staff. Looked like it was hacked through the webmail portal of mopa.gov.sy. The only thing of note was the exchange re the Barbara Walters visit. The Ministry of Presidential Affairs is basically his marketing department. Whilst one would hope they busted into this despots email, the truth is they did no such thing.
Or a couple of NSA agents looking at each other and saying "shit, I've got to go change my password."
Well, it was their own e-mail....
Speaking of which, people who don't put objects in their sentences shouldn't even have written them. ;)
Or a couple of NSA agents looking at each other and saying "shit, now we can't read their email"
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As the hacker saw much to his horror that the Syrian President's e-mail password was indeed 12345 he tried to break the connection but it was too late. Word had spread and all knew that his most important hack was one that a five year old could have bested. A week later the hacker was found with a gun in his mouth and the numbers "12345" scrawled across his walls. His last e-mail was a simple "Who uses 12345 as a password!" Other hackers said that it was a tragedy that he would be remembered for one lame hack. Word came later that day that the Syrian President had beefed up security by using his son's name as his current password. Hackers world wide turned away in disgust and refused to stoop to hacking some one that lacked even basic internet skills.
Some turned their attention to hacking President Obama's e-mail until it was found he used the password "Romneysucksballs". No hacker would dignify such a password with a hack. Later that day it was revealed that Bill Gates used "stevejobsisaweiner" as his password but most knew this was the case since the late 90s.
Governments will go to extreme lengths to avoid revealing when they have access to information that the "enemy" thinks is secure. The allies went to very extreme measures to avoid tipping the Germans off that they had access to all the communications that went out on the Enigma machine. This included letting their own troops be ambushed and killed and massive use of resources and manpower to cover up when they did use the information, such as flying a hundred aerial survey missions to cover up knowing the travel path of a sea convoy.
Fool! passwords need to be 8 digits at least. Mine is 1234567891011 It goes to 11, for extra security.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The Papal and Italian agencies turn to their roots for cipher strength: IIIIIIIVV
Or this approach for secure passwords. You must make it hard to guess by other people or brute force approachs, not hard to remember .